


nullius creaturae expers

by s0dafucker



Series: we said we hated humans (we wanted to be human) [1]
Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, Minor Violence, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pre-Bacchanal (Secret History), Recreational Drug Use, Rule 63, author-typical bunny redemption, during-bacchanal (secret history), i am trans and i want .. gorl, mostly - Freeform, the author is off the shits in this one, yes cis ppl use genderbends to be transphobic however
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:34:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21834499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s0dafucker/pseuds/s0dafucker
Summary: earlier in the song i used the term "galvanistic," and galvanism is the concept, uh, the obsolete scientific theory that there is a kind of electricity flowing through our bloodstreams, and that was our life force. i used the term because i came across it in mary shelley's "frankenstein", and that book is sort of an exploration of the theme of creating a character or making up a person. so i used the term "galvanistic" to allude to that book as a sort of symbol of how i, like, created you as a character, by pretending that i know a lot more about you than i actually do, and also to refer to the fact that i've fall—fallen in love with the characters you've created in, uh, your body of work(she’s a living corpse with one eye unfocused and rolling in the socket, the scar below her bangs puckered and ugly. she’s something horrible and lovely and you are sick with want. her hair is damp, dark, makes you think of running your fingers through it, snagging on knots like clotted blood, taking the cigarette from her mouth and dragging on it.)
Relationships: Richard Papen/Henry Winter
Series: we said we hated humans (we wanted to be human) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794694
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	nullius creaturae expers

‘my persephone,’ heather murmurs, her voice false in its smoothness, rich and worn, her rough hand stroking your cheek. you wouldn’t cast her as hades - 

eurydice, maybe, opposite your orpheus; temptation personified, love and lust woven into one magnetic tenth-grade dropout - 

she’s a living corpse with one eye unfocused and rolling in the socket, the scar below her bangs puckered and ugly. she’s something horrible and lovely and you are sick with want. ‘my ophelia,’ she says, and her lips are on your cheek, her breath of smoke and gin, and maybe it should make you worry to hear her voice in that way; 

a tone she rarely takes with you, something for persuading and pushing and pulling, always at the threads that make up other people -

never so expertly directed at _your_ unraveling - 

you’ve kissed boys with too much aftershave and girls with too much lipstick and she is something else entirely, virgil to your swooning dante, the river swelling around you, boat rocking faintly; she holds your face with one broad palm and there’s something sitting on the tip of her knife-sharp tongue, you can feel it tense and humid, but she must shelve it for another time and place and life because she’s silent. you want to reach into her and instead you tuck your dry lower lip between your crooked teeth and stare. 

is it your imagination, the swelling of her pupils? the black tide consumes and enchants- you think richly of sirens, half-drunk on her nearness- and she regards you with something ancient and fevered and nervous. there is a version of this written in someone else’s memory where she kisses you first, one where you meet in the middle and shatter, one where you went to your room without a thought to her half-invitation, but you’ve read the script already and there are no understudies. men played the womens’ roles historically, but still there’s something - _deja vu_ \- about the way you reach for her, sappho and aphrodite, _i cannot weave_ \- 

something like a seduction and something like a murder have melted into each other with all the grace of a sunset. something dionysian is breaking loose in your chest- oh happy dagger this is thy sheath. she kisses you and all at once you feel as though you’ve done something guilty and wonderful, set fire to your father’s house or threw up in someone else’s dorm or died. maybe you’ve died. 

(she is kissing you, in all your deadness, cpr-certified or so it feels, her hand in your hair.)

when she stops -

it feels like highschool, like west-coast mid-west nostalgia dunked in red wine and swallowed like a pill - 

sitting on your bed and pulling away from this terrifying creature so that she can inform you, in a rumbling tone that could be a whisper if she had ever learned how, that she has somewhere to be tonight, if you'd excuse her. 

_what a glorious hell we have found_

cameron makes a pass at you on the lake. 

(secretly, you're kind of flattered. you've never been especially close- you prefer his sister, for reasons both obvious and not; but his attempt at courtship is gentle, a spooked foal huddling closer during a thunderstorm, his soft fingers around your elbow, and it's nice, to be considered in that way.)

you count six freckles on his nose before you lean away, the faint ring of contacts around his eyes like thunderstorms, like fine china, his pupils great black lakes in the sky. you think, ridiculously, of a magritte -

_l'oiseau de ciel,_ frances or someone showed it to you - 

the bird in the sky, the sky in the bird, cameron’s eyes big gray-blue-black sweet and bright and apologizing softly. ‘ah,’ he says, like he’s won a small bet or received some trivial news; ‘alright.’

you sit out on the lawn with him, neatly slotted between him and frances, and they murmur to each other in greek when they think you’re sleeping, a mug of rum on a sloping, grassy angle, your fingers offering no stability. even in stillness it looks like the work of a drunk and cameron says something about drugs, a turn of phrase about dionysus and ecstasy, and frances laughs in that droll, humorless way she does, and you _assume_ it’s drugs, don’t you, because what else would it be. you’re drunk anyway. your head is on someone’s warm shoulder and the crickets are out in force and somewhere charlotte is arguing with bunny about the rules of something-or-other and you’re drifting aimlessly. 

_we’re dancing, right? this is dancing?_

there’s a ripped bedsheet on the back of heather’s chair in the kitchen and if she’s surprised to see you, she doesn’t show it. her hair is damp, dark, makes you think of running your fingers through it, snagging on knots like clotted blood, taking the cigarette from her mouth and dragging on it. you do the last one, if only to busy your hands, if only to occupy yourself with something besides the scent of her, clean and thick in the air. she’s dressed. immaculate, like a painting of herself, flesh-and-blood abandoned for the starched white shirt tucked into her slacks, a devil’s bargain where she came out on top. the only sign of life is the unkempt edges of her short hair, damp and tangled, framing her face like a halo, the crown of thorns; she regards you with something curious and lukewarm as you smoke. 

you don’t ask _what’s that_ and you don’t ask _what did bunny mean at dinner i didn’t even know she read the bacchae_ and you don’t ask _where were you last night because i heard the back door open and i thought it was someone going out to smoke but the door didn’t open again you don’t have to tell me but-_ because you’ve slid into the seat across from her and she’s kissing your knuckles and it takes the breath from your lungs, easy as anything. one-two punch. you drag on the cigarette and a cough stutters up to your throat and you pin it there, hold it still. 

she's watching you, even as she holds your hand in hers and kisses it softly, as the buzz of your cigarette comes in waves. the river lapping at ophelia. 

_everyone learns to live with their sins but girl you wear yours like a brand new skin_

julian is talking, he's always talking, his voice an air-conditioner hum to your orange county ears, orange peels and swimming pools and tennis courts, pomegranate seeds and switchblades, heather's face in headlights, blue dusk -

something about virgil and dante, something about _catholic repression_ and _greek ecstasy_ and nero, nero and agrippina and virgil and dante, virgil as a benevolent hades, virgil as a tour guide, summer job in pasadena slow-dancing around the norton simon, dante with his unsure hands and the cadence of the inferno being almost like a love song, cameron says, and you want to shove him off the boat. virgil in pasadena. heather murmuring something snide and dead while you guide her through an orange grove, down a marble hall to make eyes at christ in the torchlight, heather's face in headlights, christ's peaceful gaze at the flame, julian's voice fading in and out and your eyes unfocused. charlotte's legs are miles long in her tennis skirt, smooth and corpse-white, the sharp scent of booze under her perfume. she uncrosses her legs and re-crosses at the knee, your eyes shadowed and your hair unbrushed and the first week of class wondering if julian was one of those professors, staring at charlotte, doe-like in her oxfords and pleated linen. 

(your fear recurring and choking, familiar nerves making a home in the bones of your wrists long before you found charlotte and frances drunkenly clinging to each other like the to-be nurses you shared a dorm with - 

the snakelike feeling that rises up in your chest when a man stares too long, when you walk around town with only cameron in your midst, cameron who weighs ninety pounds soaking wet and has barely an inch on his sister - 

the fear that bun helped you drink away as she prattled on about the shit queers are getting in this country, what with reagan and the goddamn c-d-fucking-c, while your waiter stood on with a look like he could think of some shit he'd like to put the queers in this country through.)

you swallowed an oxy before class, like an idiot, like you’ve got a deathwish, but there’s something sweet and motherly about the way judy hands you drugs for free as you’re dragging your ass out of bed, a wink-and-nod and her saying more than asking, ‘cramps?’ as she hands the thing over. you think it was an oxy. heather in the blue twilight that doesn’t exist here, heather in the summer heat with her broad shoulders bare and bangs damp with sweat. you’re starting to sweat. charlotte smells like violets and cocktails, conjures up the ice-slick taste of martinis and salt, of skin and tennis courts and orange groves and badminton played by the glow of headlights, heather’s face in headlights, heather's eyes flat and reflective in the spotlight-shine, like police helicopters, like a high school play, lady macbeth dripping blood like roadkill. you reach for your teacup and it clatters against the saucer, julian’s voice rolling low and melodic and your nervous percussion, a sip of tea that burns your tongue, ash-bitter down your throat. 

you aren’t aware of class ending until charlotte nudges you, saying something with a joking lilt, your mind still filling in the gaps with a vague, fictional julian. she tips a flask into your tea and guides it back into your hand, her hands warm and inviting and your mouth dry. ‘you alright?’ she asks, and you do your best to nod.

‘’m high,’ you say, and it’s far-away and rasping but she gets the picture and lets you sit. you shut your eyes and visit _christ crowned with thorns,_ heather by your side. she’s holding your teacup and she’s scrutinizing jesus in the torchlight, his expression sorrowful and serious, his eyes containing multitudes. her eyes containing multitudes. her eyes containing your sweaty palms and christ’s bound wrists and the cheap marble beneath your feet faking dignity about as well as you do. old money. old manners. a tolerance for whiskey and an art museum so new you swore you could still smell fresh paint. 

she’s staring, considering, head tilted at a rigid angle, hair parted with a surgical certainty. virgil in pasadena. dante in vermont. the waves rocking and swelling and threatening to capsize; her head inclined at that brutal angle, something like a cliffside, the tide rising up beside you - 

your hair isn’t long enough that it needs to be held back, but charlotte tries anyway, her hands at the nape of your neck, cold fingers touching just-barely -

you’re vomiting into a trashcan on the quad, the afternoon light coming golden and warm and your stomach heaving violently, the taste of booze and bile heavy in your mouth (when was your last meal? you can't taste anything but the sour remains of your oxy and last night's irish coffee) -

you brace yourself on the edge of the trashcan and pull back, drag a jacket-sleeve over your mouth, sun hot and charlotte and cameron looking at you with matching concern. 

you end up in their apartment. cameron lights a cigarette in the armchair, watching you with the eyes of christ, his skin golden and his eyes glinting silver. ‘you want one?’ he asks, holds out the pack.

lucky strikes. heather’s eyes in headlights. you take one. you don’t know when you started smoking so much. cameron leans forward with his zippo to light it for you, fawn’s eyes and gentle fae-hands. you can’t tell if you’re down yet. 

they make lunch, the two of them like husband and wife stepping elegantly around each other in the tiny kitchen, in socks and shorts and charlotte's skirt swishing round her thighs. sandwiches and martinis and the jar of almost-stale olives resting on the coffee table, juice down charlotte's elegant fingers as she plucks one out and explains that they're nearly expired, found in the back of the fridge, trying to get rid of them. she feeds you one, or you imagine she does, or you imagine heather does, with her fingers rough and calloused, with her eyes dusk and wine-bitter. 

_this isn't sex, i don't think, it's just extreme empathy_

you’re lighting a cigarette for frances and there’s a cluster of moss just behind her ear, light green and soft, creeping up the tree with an odd grace. you’re worried, momentarily, that she’ll think you’re being weird- but she seems just as uninterested in your face, her own dark eyes somewhere beyond you. through you. you’re shaking out the match and thinking of lying down in the moss, becoming forever preserved in a peat bog somewhere. you’ve got a translation due by thursday, and it’s tuesday, and you’re tossing a match into the sprawling grass of frances’s country house, resting atop the frost-stiff ground in all of your undoing. you’re all ditching together, end-of-semester nerves and some strange static, all of you piled into heather’s car so late into monday that it had already become tuesday, someone passing around the cigarettes, a solo cup from a shitty party still held in your cold hand. 

(all of you except bunny; frances explains, as she’s smoking and you’re gazing at the moss, that marion - 

-you’ve never met, but you’ve seen her before; bunny’s girlfriend, five-foot-nothing, the two of them like butch-femme salt and pepper shakers- 

\- wants her studying for the end of term, and it’s easy enough to believe were it not for the fluttery way frances says it, cushioned by the dragging on her cigarette, her aborted attempts at french inhales. you don’t push it.)

'i'm getting ash on my coat,' she mutters, lip curling in that lazy, snobbish way she has.

charlotte moves to make room for her on the loveseat, the two of them in black and white like chess queens, frances’s black tights with a run in the thigh, slices of her pale skin visible when she folds herself into charlotte’s edges, her skirt velvet and her jacket corduroy and her eyes shadowed purple-black when they close. she reaches, unseeing, into charlotte’s hair and starts to unpin it, the two of them with their same shade of smudged lipstick and slept-in intimacy. 

(you ache to see it.)

you wonder how at home you really are here, with your dresses in black-burgandy-wine, thrift store jackets and gold-plated earrings, the familiar skin-too-tight feeling of tucking a men’s shirt into women’s trousers and thinking of bunny’s light tone when she told you about the raids, about hole in the wall bars and the three-article rule, the first spark of fear you’d ever seen in her hound-dog eyes. her rough hands fiddling with her drink and her untailored shirt, buttons on the wrong side, something half-joking about how folks do it in california. something jealous, almost, her and her close-cropped hair, you and your cheap finery. she’d paid for your meal and had a joke in her eyes the whole time. 

you walk to the kitchen in your unmatched socks and borrowed bathrobe, your bra somewhere upstairs, your legs unshaven, and cameron and heather greet you over a half-played card game. cameron, at least, has the dignity to look like it’s morning, his glasses low on his nose and his hair unwashed and hanging around his jaw. 

(they were talking in something that wasn’t greek and wasn’t latin when you arrived, low and dark and strange, but they quieted when they heard you walk in and you don’t know what that means. you’re sure it’s nothing.)

heather sets down her hand and cameron sighs. ‘fuck you,’ he murmurs, and you’re surprised to see heather grin slightly; the wolfish, sharp-toothed smile she gives you when you’re particularly clever. 

she looks - 

better than you do, which is something you wish you wouldn’t notice -

she looks _good,_ not like she’s combed her hair or put on foundation but more like she’s electric, glowing, something about her more alive than anyone else. her eyes are on fire. 

‘ramona,’ she says, looking like a vegas gambler with her hand of cards and snake-eyes, ‘are you familiar with the idea of a bacchanal?’ 

(cameron mutters, ‘jesus christ,’ and something in greek about _best two out of three,_ to which heather only runs a hand through her hair and refocuses her gaze on you.)

(you _are_ familiar, for the record, by-the-by- you’re a goddamn greek scholar, and you’re polishing off a teacup mimosa when heather finally skips the theatrics and asks you straight out, lights your cigarette and explains they’ve all been sneaking into the woods and getting high without you.)

you want to kiss her with your mouth orange-juice-sweet but she sips her coffee and looks too untouchable, formidable, like a statue. (though, if you tilt your head, you think you can see the antinous mondragone in her marble features, yourself the pseudo-hadrien kissing her with lips cherry red.)

she asks if you know how to tie a chiton and you laugh, out loud, because you’re sure she’s joking, and she isn’t. 

_so give me a sign that i’m not making love to myself_

frances studies you, in the candlelight; charlotte ties you into your bedsheet; it feels faintly like prom, like she’ll zip you up the back and compliment your hair next. it’s surreal. there’s a joke about the thread count of these things perched under your tongue, but you swallow it down because you are the esteemed heiress to an oil well and it feels horrible and imperative that you don’t give these girls any reason to turn on you. not tonight. 

you won’t remember much in the morning -

the feeling of running that matches your blistered feet and thorn-cut arms - 

your thighs tacky and drying, the taste of heather’s fingers like smoke - 

but you feel lucid, more so than ever before. like waking from a long dream, the wind on your face cold and beautiful for its coldness. the air smells like woodsmoke and you can feel your hands like you never have- they’re like doves, or crows, something elegant and alive. 

it isn’t until the man dies that you feel anything close to unpleasantness. 

(it will make you panic, in the morning, after you’ve showered and changed and come down, been helped into a bed between cameron and heather with their bodies warm and sweaty, slept and slept and woken with only a trace of the high, enough to make you anxious-quick in your movements, enough to make you bury your face in her chest and cry. only for a few minutes, quiet and fast and wet on her bare sternum. you’re going to go to jail. you’re going to die. you smoke a cigarette in bed.)

you’ll have a split lip, in the morning, and you won’t know what it’s from, but tonight you watch heather’s fist in slow motion cracking against this man’s face like art, like a movie, and it’s primal and it’s sick. it’s beautiful, her with her bloody knuckles and glasses knocked half-off.

(what comes next is static, which scares you.)

the grave-digging breaks charlotte’s nails, dirty and dry-blood-red, and you watch her ruined manicure wash off in the dim bathroom. you all shower together and it should be weird, shouldn’t it, to be brushing shoulders and hands and thighs, but heather washes your hair for you and so it’s alright. 

(you dug the grave. you remember it. it was shallow and unfinished and heather and cameron bore the body, on their shoulders, and you looked at heather and thought of how caravaggio got away with murder. god, this is murder. it is morning and you are swallowing vodka like romeo and poison, your twelve year old self and nail polish remover. it is the middle of the night and you are digging a shallow grave that this man will never lie in and you aren’t looking at him. you won’t.)

frances is singing, her voice high and clear in the night, and you are finally okay. you are at peace. the air is cold and thick and your lungs are strong, your body is powerful. you’re a current rushing through a river, bearing virgil and dante forever onward. dante faints, into virgil’s arms, _and down i fell, as one that swoons on sleep_ \- cameron catches you, in his sweet arms, his face boyish, doe-like. he rights you, you remember it clearly, and the two of you stand beneath the trees until only you are left. frances’s voice echoes, and it sends a shiver down your spine. like something is wrong. 

the crickets chirp and you are running, walking, singing old hymns and feeling pain that is there and not, walking over sharp stones and knowing it should hurt, shouldn’t it. heather is smoking a cigarette but there is something wild in her eyes, and you can’t place this, more like a dream than a memory - a shaking sip of your drink - more a dream than a memory, more a fantasy, heather dripping blood from somewhere, somewhere on her face that was painting her in red, her shoulders and her back lighting a fire in you. flames licking at your spine and a terrible look in her eyes, the two of you too close to the old dirt road, too far from the shelter of the woods. 

(you don’t know how or why you remember this, because it doesn’t line up with anything else, it seems fake, and yet- 

a car rushed past, too-fast, would’ve killed you if you’d been closer, and it lit heather in that unnatural white, her mouth red, dripping, the glare of her glasses making it impossible to see her eyes.

‘i met _god_ ,’ she says, and she smiles, and it’s red-pink and sharp and she is cast in darkness once more, in moonlight. she’s still holding her cigarette. you decide that you aren’t going to scream.)

you can’t speak, at breakfast. frances and charlotte curl up into the loveseat and murmur to each other, both in tennis sweaters you think belong to cameron. 

(the blank space scares you. you’ve blacked out before, but never like this.)

heather kisses your cheek and says something low and soothing, greek or latin, thorny and sweet. you can’t stop thinking about her mouth in red. 

(you’re going to call bunny, when you get back to school. god knows what you’ll tell her - 

so you’ll go see judy, then, someone who you can tell the vague details -

it’ll just sound like a bad trip - 

you’re trembling, inside-out. your skin is too cold.)

when your voice comes back and cameron’s doesn't-

(he’s standing in the bathroom, wringing out his hair - 

charlotte looks just like him like this, her hair falling to her back instead of her shoulders, the suggestion of curves where cameron is lithe and chiseled - 

blood-red trickling down his moon-white skin, your eyes tracing out the line of his jaw.)

heather hums, a quiet _that’s-too-bad,_ her arm around your waist while the other tilts cameron’s chin up to look at her, her rough fingers probing gently at his throat. you were going to be a doctor, once upon a time. it feels like someone else’s life. orange groves and swimming pools and blue twilight tennis courts. hollywood and pasadena and heels clicking on fake marble. heather’s hand around your waist while she diagnoses and you don’t. heather’s tongue in your mouth. the taste of blood. 

(you blacked out. you blacked out but you remember her covered in blood and you remember fear, and you remember a nicotine buzz and a wetness on your hands. your mouth. between your legs. you can’t tell if you had sex or -)

_but suddenly i can look through your eyes again_

you get high with judy. you sleep with heather. you go out to dinner with bunny. cameron’s french has come back to him, halting high-school accent, and frances tells you what he says, sometimes. judy is lighting a bong for you and you’re wearing pajamas that belong to her, an oversize jimmy buffett shirt, a mens’ xl, gym shorts left over from her middle school, clothes that drown your body in them. you take a hit and you pretend you don’t have a body. judy makes you a kamikaze and you will throw it back up before the night is over but before that you just cry, head on her shoulder, and she doesn’t ask questions as you howl into the night. 

(you have the errant thought that you will not be able to run from this forever. the drugs will run out and the wound in your mind will fail to mend itself. judy strokes your hair and paints your nails and you drink. you relish in the cliched nature of it, of the tackiness inherent to you. west coast sensibilities.)

_baby the effects are so good these days- if there were gears behind those big brown eyes i wouldn’t be able to tell the difference_

when heather arrives at your dorm in the middle of the night and asks, calmly, if you’re doing anything later, maybe you should turn her down. peer pressure, you’ll say if you’re ever questioned. the proverbial pomegranate seeds come in the form of something like dxm or dmt, and you would ask but it doesn’t matter because you’ve already taken them and she’s already slipping an elegant little switchblade into your jacket pocket. ‘my persephone,’ she calls you, and you kiss her, you hold her face in your hands.

**Author's Note:**

> this is just typical dyke drama
> 
> (summary from nervous young inhumans by car seat headrest + title/sections from unforgiving girl (shes not an) by car seat headrest)


End file.
